TomCat

More Republican Sabotage

 Posted by at 11:21 am  Politics
Mar 092015
 

I thought that the Republicans’ unfrequented act of sedition, the Butcher Bibi Show, marked the limit of how far the Republican Party would go in their unconstitutional sabotage of the President’s responsibility to conduct foreign policy.  I was wrong.  Now Republicans are actually reaching out and directly threatening a party to those negotiations.

0309Sedition

Republican senators warned Iran on Monday that any nuclear deal made with U.S. President Barack Obama could last only as long as he remains in office, in an unusual intervention into U.S. foreign policy-making.

The letter, signed by 46 U.S. senators, says Congress plays a role in ratifying international agreements and points out that Obama will leave office in January 2017, while many in Congress will remain in Washington long after that.

"We will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei," the letter read.

"The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of an agreement at any time," it read.

The letter, first reported by Bloomberg News, followed a speech to a joint meeting of Congress last week by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who warned that the United States was negotiating a "bad deal" with Tehran.

It comes as world powers have been negotiating with Iran to try to reach some form of understanding by the end of March before a final deal in June that could ease crippling sanctions that have crippled Iran’s economy…

Inserted from <Huffington Post>

These Republicans are conducting their foreign sabotage the same way they do domestically: with lies.  Republicans know that they have a short time with a power advantage, because the outlook for 2016 is as favorable for Democrats as 2014 was for Republicans.  In all probability there will be Congress far more amenable to backing up the policies of a Democratic President.  How can I be confident that we will have a Democratic President?  We have no alternative.  If the Republicans win the White House, the Fascist Five Injustices of SCROTUS will become the SS Six or Stranglehold Seven.  If that happens, America will be over.

As for the graphical question, it most assuredly is sedition.

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Open Thread–3/9/2015

 Posted by at 11:21 am  Open Thread, Personal, Plus, Politics
Mar 092015
 

This week is turning out to be quite busy already.  Wednesday, my normal grocery delivery day from Store to Door, I have an appointment I cannot change, so I have to get groceries from Safeway.com.  They are coming tomorrow, moving prep for that to today.  The kitty basking weather is winding down.  Only 58° forecast today.

Per Nameless’ Request:

0309FeetUp

i-feet.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:11 (average 4:86).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: For all his partisan animus toward President Obama, it is still shocking to see the Senate’s majority leader, Mitch McConnell, urge the nation’s governors to undermine the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate power plant emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas responsible for global warming.

Mr. McConnell, a Kentucky Republican who seems to hold Mr. Obama personally responsible for what has been the decades-long decline of coal jobs in his state, expressed his defiance in an op-ed article [Bought Bitch delinked] Wednesday in The Lexington Herald-Leader.

The administration has proposed regulations aimed at limiting emissions. Mr. McConnell urged the governors not to cooperate with a joint rule-making process aimed at developing final regulations under which Washington will set emissions targets while giving states flexibility to implement them. Sabotaging this process, he says, will give the courts time to find the plan illegal or give the Senate time to figure out a way to block it. “Without your support,” he said, the administration “won’t be able to demonstrate the capacity to carry out such political extremism.”

Bought Bitch Mitch is pursuing a plan that won’t help coal jobs. Mechanization is replacing many.  There are few left, because coal can’t compete.  Fracking has provided a surplus of unnatural gas, and the Saudis are flooding the market with cheap oil to forestall a shift to green energy.  The liar is trying to protect profits, not jobs.

From Alternet: The U.S. economy is picking up steam but most Americans aren’t feeling it. By contrast, most European economies are still in bad shape, but most Europeans are doing relatively well.

What’s behind this? Two big facts.

First, American corporations exert far more political influence in the United States than their counterparts exert in their own countries…

…The second fact is most big American corporations have no particular allegiance to America. They don’t want Americans to have better wages. Their only allegiance and responsibility to their shareholders — which often requires lower wages  to fuel larger profits and higher share prices.

Of course the Reich on the left, Robert Reich, is right about the Reich on the right, the Republican Reich, which is wrong by definition. Click through for more than this tiny taste about how RepubliCorp is screwing YOU.

From Crooks and Liars: Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver didn’t hold back when discussing the racist emails being sent by the Ferguson, MO police department and court officials which were discovered during the Department of Justice investigation of racial prejudice in the city’s police and judicial system.

 

It amazes me that Oliver can be so funny, while being spot on about racism at it’s worst.

Cartoon:

0309Cartoon

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Not Yet Over

 Posted by at 10:58 am  Politics
Mar 082015
 

It was spring vacation in my Junior year.  I wanted to do battle in the front lines.  It might have been good for the movement, if future Republicans hadf murdered a young white boy, not yet 17.  But the protestors were better that that.  For my own safety, two very large and very kindly black ladies linked arms with me, refused to let go, and kept me well behind the front lines.  I didn’t get to see much of the violence, but I did get to see way too much blood.  Fifty years later, Obama was upbeat, but realistic.

0308selma50

On this day in 1965, the nation watched as peaceful civil rights demonstrators were savagely beaten by police as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., a bloody sacrifice that historians credit with helping to usher in the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act days later.

Fifty years later, with the nation embroiled in a fresh debate about race in America, the country’s first black president joined a bipartisan congressional delegation and tens of thousands of marchers at the foot of the iconic civil rights landmark to commemorate a day that forever altered the landscape of American history.

“There are places, and moments in America where this nation’s destiny has been decided,”  President Obama told the sea of people who had stood for hours to hear him pay tribute to the day known as Bloody Sunday. “Many are sites of war – Concord and Lexington, Appomattox and Gettysburg.  Others are sites that symbolize the daring of America’s character – Independence Hall and Seneca Falls, Kitty Hawk and Cape Canaveral.”

“Selma is such a place,” he added.

The speech came several days after the Justice Department released a searing report admonishing police in Ferguson, Mo., for engaging in a vicious pattern of racial bias. The police department was home to Darren Wilson, a white officer whose killing in August of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, sparked nationwide protests about police brutality in communities of color throughout the United States…

Inserted from <Washington Post>

The Post was overly generous to call the Congressional delegation bipartisan.  Many of the Republicans present attended only after their intended absence became a talking point.

Here is the video of Obama’s address in it’s entirety.

And click here for the transcript.

One key focus of the speech is that the civil rights movement continues today and has helped many different minorities.  How sad it is that racism was waning quickly, and we would be much further along had the Republican party not embraced racism, as part of the Southern strategy.  Obama alluded to this, but called for us to press on, as the struggle is not yet over.

Another key focus of the speech was the Voting Rights Act.  He alluded to those who are keeping it week, without calling out the Republican Party by name.  He also said that the Congressional delegation could prove their sincerity by returning to Washington and fixing the voting rights act.

I have no doubt that I’ll have more coverage of this story, because these Republicans now need to prove to their rabid base that their sheets and hoods are still intact.  They will immediately return to abusing their power to disenfranchise minority voters.

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Open Thread–3/8/2014

 Posted by at 10:57 am  Open Thread, Personal, Politics
Mar 082015
 

As it does every year, springing forward fouled up my night’s sleep.  Worse yet, I’ll have to wait until an hour later, before I can go bask in the sun.  70° forecast.  Today’s plan is to het my articles up and try to unspring.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:23 (average 4:54).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: The Westboro Baptist Church, long-associated with their deranged and ugly protests at the funerals of US troops, have been thwarted in their attempt to ‘protest’ at the funeral of actor Leonard Nimoy, who died on Friday. According to The Guardian:

The church posted a Twitter update lamenting its inability to picket the event, which it said was due to a lack of publicity over the location.

Awww…that’s a shame: the crazed, rancid bigots couldn’t make it.

Those poor Republicans! How awful it must be to stew in their own hatred!

From NY Times: Senator Rand Paul succeeded on Saturday in persuading the leadership of the Republican Party in Kentucky to help him resolve a predicament that could threaten his plans to run for president in 2016: a state law that prohibits candidates from appearing twice on the same ballot.

To avoid running afoul of the law, Mr. Paul asked the state party to suspend its presidential primary, scheduled for May next year, and hold a caucus instead, a decision the party’s executive committee adopted on Saturday. A caucus would help Mr. Paul in two ways. First, it is likely to be held well before May, meaning it could assist him in building his delegate count early in the Republican nominating contest. Second, because caucuses do not require actual ballots, it resolves the main legal question.

Mr. Paul, the junior senator from Kentucky, has said that he intends to run for re-election while pursuing the Republican nomination for president. The move to a caucus system would relieve him of having to give up his seat.

A temporary rule to allow a Republican to break a permanent law is Republican SOP.

From Think Progress: Months after Attorney General Eric Holder launched an investigation of Ferguson Police Department in the wake of Michael Brown’s death, the Department of Justice released a 102-page report detailing systemic race discrimination and abuses of power in the embattled city. But despite the DOJ’s damning findings, the city’s mayor remains unconvinced that widespread problems exist.

“What they’ve shown is that it has happened. Now, how often has that happened? I don’t know. Their assertion is it happens regularly. Based on what? I’m not sure yet,” said Mayor James Knowles III, during an interview Friday. “Do they have a statistic that tells me that they’ve examined every arrest that we’ve made for the past four years and that half, or all, or 10 percent, or 5 percent are unconstitutional or without cause? They do not have that. They have not examined at that level that I know of at this point.”

He also maintains that there is “no proof” of gross civil rights violations.

Say what?!!?  There is equally no proof that the sun rises in the morning, that the Pope is Catholic or that bears shit in the woods. When is the next election in Ferguson? I trust there will be better voter turnout.

Cartoon:

0308Cartoon

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Another Oil Train Burns

 Posted by at 9:59 am  Politics
Mar 072015
 

It seems that we can’t turn on the TV anymore without seeing a burning oil train polluting the environment, despoiling waterways,and threatening lives and property.  Unfortunately, what makes that all seem insignificant to the criminal corporations and corrupt politicians that allow Bakken  crude trains, is the huge profits they also carry.

0307train_oilA derailed oil train continues to burn in northwestern Illinois near the Mississippi River town of Galena more than 24 hours after it crashed.

It is the third fiery derailment of trains carrying crude from the Bakken area of North Dakota in the past three weeks, raising more questions about the volatility of the oil and the safety of the tank cars used to transport crude.

No one was hurt when the BNSF Railway freight train derailed at about 1:20 p.m. Thursday in a hilly and heavily wooded area near where a tributary joins the Mississippi, about three miles south of Galena, IL.

In a statement, BNSF says 21 of the train’s 103 tank cars loaded with light Bakken crude left the tracks and at least five of them ruptured and caught fire. Witnesses reported seeing the fireball from miles away…

Inserted from <NPR>

After a long segue way, Rachel Maddow also reported this story.

The claim that this a controlled burn is a pure lie.  They have been cooling that car to prevent a BLEVE (Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion).  The company is calling it a “controlled burn”.  Comparing a BLEVE to a controlled BURN is like comparing a KKK Republican to Mother Theresa.  Years ago, as a volunteer firefighter, I was using the stream from a 2 1/2” live too cool a propane tank adjacent a burning building to prevent a BLEVE.  I was about 100 feet away, and I was terrified.  I knew that, if that tank blew, my chances of survival were nil.  Compared to this, that was tiny.  I only hope that a one mile radius is far enough.  These are the new “safe” cars.  That’s another lie.

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Open Thread–3/7/2015

 Posted by at 9:57 am  Open Thread, Personal, Politics
Mar 072015
 

My helper friend finally made it yesterday, and we shared six plus hours of heavy cleaning.  Needless to say, I’m way pooped, but I’m writing, because, at my age, I need more days than I have left.  On the plus side, today is definitely a kitty basking day with a forecast high of 70°.  I feel so sorry for my Eastern and Midwest friends.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 6:12 (average 8:28).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From The Oregonian: A sweeping voter registration bill that could add another 300,000 to Oregon’s voting rolls won final passage in the Oregon Senate on Thursday on a 17-13 vote and heads to Gov. Kate Brown for her promised signature.

The so-called "New Motor Voter Bill" was promoted by Brown when she was secretary of state as a way to remove many of the barriers to voting, particularly for younger and poorer Oregonians who tend to move more often.

Republicans, however, charged that using drivers’ license data to automatically register voters raised worries about ID theft and undermined the privacy of Oregonians. House Bill 2177 passed both chambers without a single Republican vote. The only Democrat to vote no was Sen. Betsy Johnson of Scappoose, who had cast the deciding vote against a similar measure that died in the 2013 session.

When someone registers for a Driver’s License or an OID (same without driving, like I have), they are automatically registered to vote. This does not invalidate the many other ways Oregonians with no license or OID can register.  Kudos to Governor Kate and the Oregon Democrats, except the DINO that needs to be primaried.  Oregon leads the way!

From The New Yorker: In what could be a prelude to a Presidential run in 2016, on Friday Joe Biden released to the public both e-mails that he has written while serving as Vice-President for the past six years.

Biden took pride in announcing that he had sent both messages from his official government e-mail address, adding, “I have nothing to hide.”

Minutes after the e-mails were released, the media pored over the treasure trove of materials, which offer a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse into Biden’s tenure as Vice-President.

The first e-mail, written to President Obama in December of 2009, asks about the time and place of the White House holiday party.

Dang Andy!! Joe released both of them?!!? ARGH!! Isn’t that TOO transparent? 😉

From NY Times: The coffers of Jeb Bush’s not-quite-declared campaign for president are filling at such a rate that fund-raisers have reportedly been instructed not to ask megadonors to give more than $1 million each this quarter. The concern is seemliness — that acceptance of multimillion-dollar checks from deep-pocketed supporters could bolster the impression that Mr. Bush, the former Florida governor, is in their debt, according to a Washington Post report.

Just a million?!!? Strike Three is smelling just like Little Lord Willard!!

Cartoon:

0307Cartoon

What has changed?  The Republican Party emplaced the racists.

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Personal Update–3/6/2014

 Posted by at 11:51 am  Open Thread, Personal, Politics
Mar 062015
 

I hate to do this, but I’ve been pushing myself hard lately, with everything that has been going on, and I am put of energy.  Yesterday’s trip to the store really took it out of me.  I slept poorly due to leg pain.  I planned to purchase a Galaxy 5, but Sprint is having a special that gives me an i-phone and a Samsung tablet  for $30 per month less than the G5.  When I figure it out, I guess I get an i-gasm.  Also, given that we have a forecast high of 65° today, feline physiology demands a basking break.  And I think my helper-friend is coming.  I have a bunch of housework to do and a busy schedule next week, so I may be a bit scarce for a few days.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:17 (average 5:13).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Cartoon:

0306Cartoon

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